In mid-March, Meta* announced that the Llama family model had reached the 1 billion downloads mark, up from 650 million in early December 2024. At its inaugural LlamaCon developer conference last Tuesday, Meta provided an update, with the number of downloads reaching 1.2 billion.
Speaking, Chief Product Officer, Chris Cox, emphasized the strong involvement of the developer community, “We have thousands of developers contributing to tens of thousands of derivative models that are downloaded hundreds of thousands of times a month.” This demonstrates the widespread acceptance of Llama as a platform for artificial intelligence research and development.
Llama’s rise in popularity has been accompanied by a growing audience for Meta AI, the company’s model-family-powered assistant. According to Cox, the number of Meta AI users has approached one billion. This figure reflects both the successful integration of AI capabilities directly into products and the growing user interest in intelligent assistants.
Despite the impressive momentum of the Llama ecosystem, Meta faces serious competition from other major players in artificial intelligence. An example is Alibaba’s recent release of the Qwen3 family of models, which has been highly competitive on a number of key AI benchmarks. The development of Qwen3, as well as other advances in open and closed models, are shaping a complex and dynamic landscape in AI.
* Meta (Facebook and Instagram) is recognized as extremist and banned in Russia
